Summary: Everyone knows that when you give your assets to someone else, they always keep them safe. If this is true for individuals, it is certainly true for businesses.
Custodians always tell the truth and manage funds properly. They won't have any interest in taking the assets as an exchange operator would. Auditors tell the truth and can't be misled. That's because organizations that are regulated are incapable of lying and don't make mistakes.

First, some background. Here is a summary of how custodians make us more secure:

Previously, we might give Alice our crypto assets to hold. There were risks:

Alice might take the assets and disappear.
Alice might spend the assets and pretend that she still has them (fractional model).
Alice might store the assets insecurely and they'll get stolen.
Alice might give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force.
Alice might lose access to the assets.

But "no worries", Alice has a custodian named Bob. Bob is dressed in a nice suit. He knows some politicians. And he drives a Porsche. "So you have nothing to worry about!". And look at all the benefits we get:

Alice can't take the assets and disappear (unless she asks Bob or never gives them to Bob).
Alice can't spend the assets and pretend that she still has them. (Unless she didn't give them to Bob or asks him for them.)
Alice can't store the assets insecurely so they get stolen. (After all - she doesn't have any control over the withdrawal process from any of Bob's systems, right?)
Alice can't give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force. (Bob will stop her, right Bob?)
Alice can't lose access to the funds. (She'll always be present, sane, and remember all secrets, right?)

See - all problems are solved! All we have to worry about now is:

Bob might take the assets and disappear.
Bob might spend the assets and pretend that he still has them (fractional model).
Bob might store the assets insecurely and they'll get stolen.
Bob might give the assets to someone else by mistake or by force.
Bob might lose access to the assets.

It's pretty simple. Before we had to trust Alice. Now we only have to trust Alice, Bob, and all the ways in which they communicate. Just think of how much more secure we are!

"On top of that", Bob assures us, "we're using a special wallet structure". Bob shows Alice a diagram. "We've broken the balance up and store it in lots of smaller wallets. That way", he assures her, "a thief can't take it all at once". And he points to a historic case where a large sum was taken "because it was stored in a single wallet... how stupid".
"Very early on, we used to have all the crypto in one wallet", he said, "and then one Christmas a hacker came and took it all. We call him the Grinch. Now we individually wrap each crypto and stick it under a binary search tree. The Grinch has never been back since."

"As well", Bob continues, "even if someone were to get in, we've got insurance. It covers all thefts and even coercion, collusion, and misplaced keys - only subject to the policy terms and conditions." And with that, he pulls out a phone-book sized contract and slams it on the desk with a thud. "Yep", he continues, "we're paying top dollar for one of the best policies in the country!"
"Can I read it?' Alice asks. "Sure," Bob says, "just as soon as our legal team is done with it. They're almost through the first chapter." He pauses, then continues. "And can you believe that sales guy Mike? He has the same year Porsche as me. I mean, what are the odds?"

"Do you use multi-sig?", Alice asks. "Absolutely!" Bob replies. "All our engineers are fully trained in multi-sig. Whenever we want to set up a new wallet, we generate 2 separate keys in an air-gapped process and store them in this proprietary system here. Look, it even requires the biometric signature from one of our team members to initiate any withdrawal." He demonstrates by pressing his thumb into the display. "We use a third-party cloud validation API to match the thumbprint and authorize each withdrawal. The keys are also backed up daily to an off-site third-party."
"Wow that's really impressive," Alice says, "but what if we need access for a withdrawal outside of office hours?" "Well that's no issue", Bob says, "just send us an email, call, or text message and we always have someone on staff to help out. Just another part of our strong commitment to all our customers!"

"What about Proof of Reserve?", Alice asks. "Of course", Bob replies, "though rather than publish any blockchain addresses or signed transaction, for privacy we just do a SHA256 refactoring of the inverse hash modulus for each UTXO nonce and combine the smart contract coefficient consensus in our hyperledger lightning node. But it's really simple to use." He pushes a button and a large green checkmark appears on a screen. "See - the algorithm ran through and reserves are proven."
"Wow", Alice says, "you really know your stuff! And that is easy to use! What about fiat balances?" "Yeah, we have an auditor too", Bob replies, "Been using him for a long time so we have quite a strong relationship going! We have special books we give him every year and he's very efficient! Checks the fiat, crypto, and everything all at once!"

"We used to have a nice offline multi-sig setup we've been using without issue for the past 5 years, but I think we'll move all our funds over to your facility," Alice says. "Awesome", Bob replies, "Thanks so much! This is perfect timing too - my Porsche got a dent on it this morning. We have the paperwork right over here." "Great!", Alice replies.
And with that, Alice gets out her pen and Bob gets the contract. "Don't worry", he says, "you can take your crypto-assets back anytime you like - just subject to our cancellation policy. Our annual management fees are also super low and we don't adjust them often".

How many holes have to exist for your funds to get stolen?
Just one.

Why are we taking a powerful offline multi-sig setup, widely used globally in hundreds of different/lacking regulatory environments with 0 breaches to date, and circumventing it by a demonstrably weak third party layer? And paying a great expense to do so?
If you go through the list of breaches in the past 2 years to highly credible organizations, you go through the list of major corporate frauds (only the ones we know about), you go through the list of all the times platforms have lost funds, you go through the list of times and ways that people have lost their crypto from identity theft, hot wallet exploits, extortion, etc... and then you go through this custodian with a fine-tooth comb and truly believe they have value to add far beyond what you could, sticking your funds in a wallet (or set of wallets) they control exclusively is the absolute worst possible way to take advantage of that security.

The best way to add security for crypto-assets is to make a stronger multi-sig. With one custodian, what you are doing is giving them your cryptocurrency and hoping they're honest, competent, and flawlessly secure. It's no different than storing it on a really secure exchange. Maybe the insurance will cover you. Didn't work for Bitpay in 2015. Didn't work for Yapizon in 2017. Insurance has never paid a claim in the entire history of cryptocurrency. But maybe you'll get lucky. Maybe your exact scenario will buck the trend and be what they're willing to cover. After the large deductible and hopefully without a long and expensive court battle.

And you want to advertise this increase in risk, the lapse of judgement, an accident waiting to happen, as though it's some kind of benefit to customers ("Free institutional-grade storage for your digital assets.")? And then some people are writing to the OSC that custodians should be mandatory for all funds on every exchange platform? That this somehow will make Canadians as a whole more secure or better protected compared with standard air-gapped multi-sig? On what planet?

Most of the problems in Canada stemmed from one thing - a lack of transparency. If Canadians had known what a joke Quadriga was - it wouldn't have grown to lose $400m from hard-working Canadians from coast to coast to coast. And Gerald Cotten would be in jail, not wherever he is now (at best, rotting peacefully). EZ-BTC and mister Dave Smilie would have been a tiny little scam to his friends, not a multi-million dollar fraud. Einstein would have got their act together or been shut down BEFORE losing millions and millions more in people's funds generously donated to criminals. MapleChange wouldn't have even been a thing. And maybe we'd know a little more about CoinTradeNewNote - like how much was lost in there. Almost all of the major losses with cryptocurrency exchanges involve deception with unbacked funds.
So it's great to see transparency reports from BitBuy and ShakePay where someone independently verified the backing. The only thing we don't have is:

ANY CERTAINTY BALANCES WEREN'T EXCLUDED. Quadriga's largest account was $70m. 80% of funds are in 20% of accounts (Pareto principle). All it takes is excluding a few really large accounts - and nobody's the wiser. A fractional platform can easily pass any audit this way.
ANY VISIBILITY WHATSOEVER INTO THE CUSTODIANS. BitBuy put out their report before moving all the funds to their custodian and ShakePay apparently can't even tell us who the custodian is. That's pretty important considering that basically all of the funds are now stored there.
ANY IDEA ABOUT THE OTHER EXCHANGES. In order for this to be effective, it has to be the norm. It needs to be "unusual" not to know. If obscurity is the norm, then it's super easy for people like Gerald Cotten and Dave Smilie to blend right in.

It's not complicated to validate cryptocurrency assets. They need to exist, they need to be spendable, and they need to cover the total balances. There are plenty of credible people and firms across the country that have the capacity to reasonably perform this validation. Having more frequent checks by different, independent, parties who publish transparent reports is far more valuable than an annual check by a single "more credible/official" party who does the exact same basic checks and may or may not publish anything. Here's an example set of requirements that could be mandated:

First report within 1 month of launching, another within 3 months, and further reports at minimum every 6 months thereafter.
No auditor can be repeated within a 12 month period.
All reports must be public, identifying the auditor and the full methodology used.
All auditors must be independent of the firm being audited with no conflict of interest.
Reports must include the percentage of each asset backed, and how it's backed.
The auditor publishes a hash list, which lists a hash of each customer's information and balances that were included. Hash is one-way encryption so privacy is fully preserved. Every customer can use this to have 100% confidence they were included.
If we want more extensive requirements on audits, these should scale upward based on the total assets at risk on the platform, and whether the platform has loaned their assets out.

There are ways to structure audits such that neither crypto assets nor customer information are ever put at risk, and both can still be properly validated and publicly verifiable. There are also ways to structure audits such that they are completely reasonable for small platforms and don't inhibit innovation in any way. By making the process as reasonable as possible, we can completely eliminate any reason/excuse that an honest platform would have for not being audited. That is arguable far more important than any incremental improvement we might get from mandating "the best of the best" accountants. Right now we have nothing mandated and tons of Canadians using offshore exchanges with no oversight whatsoever.

Transparency does not prove crypto assets are safe. CoinTradeNewNote, Flexcoin ($600k), and Canadian Bitcoins ($100k) are examples where crypto-assets were breached from platforms in Canada. All of them were online wallets and used no multi-sig as far as any records show. This is consistent with what we see globally - air-gapped multi-sig wallets have an impeccable record, while other schemes tend to suffer breach after breach. We don't actually know how much CoinTrader lost because there was no visibility. Rather than publishing details of what happened, the co-founder of CoinTrader silently moved on to found another platform - the "most trusted way to buy and sell crypto" - a site that has no information whatsoever (that I could find) on the storage practices and a FAQ advising that “[t]rading cryptocurrency is completely safe” and that having your own wallet is “entirely up to you! You can certainly keep cryptocurrency, or fiat, or both, on the app.” Doesn't sound like much was learned here, which is really sad to see.
It's not that complicated or unreasonable to set up a proper hardware wallet. Multi-sig can be learned in a single course. Something the equivalent complexity of a driver's license test could prevent all the cold storage exploits we've seen to date - even globally. Platform operators have a key advantage in detecting and preventing fraud - they know their customers far better than any custodian ever would. The best job that custodians can do is to find high integrity individuals and train them to form even better wallet signatories. Rather than mandating that all platforms expose themselves to arbitrary third party risks, regulations should center around ensuring that all signatories are background-checked, properly trained, and using proper procedures. We also need to make sure that signatories are empowered with rights and responsibilities to reject and report fraud. They need to know that they can safely challenge and delay a transaction - even if it turns out they made a mistake. We need to have an environment where mistakes are brought to the surface and dealt with. Not one where firms and people feel the need to hide what happened. In addition to a knowledge-based test, an auditor can privately interview each signatory to make sure they're not in coercive situations, and we should make sure they can freely and anonymously report any issues without threat of retaliation.
A proper multi-sig has each signature held by a separate person and is governed by policies and mutual decisions instead of a hierarchy. It includes at least one redundant signature. For best results, 3of4, 3of5, 3of6, 4of5, 4of6, 4of7, 5of6, or 5of7.

History has demonstrated over and over again the risk of hot wallets even to highly credible organizations. Nonetheless, many platforms have hot wallets for convenience. While such losses are generally compensated by platforms without issue (for example Poloniex, Bitstamp, Bitfinex, Gatecoin, Coincheck, Bithumb, Zaif, CoinBene, Binance, Bitrue, Bitpoint, Upbit, VinDAX, and now KuCoin), the public tends to focus more on cases that didn't end well. Regardless of what systems are employed, there is always some level of risk. For that reason, most members of the public would prefer to see third party insurance.
Rather than trying to convince third party profit-seekers to provide comprehensive insurance and then relying on an expensive and slow legal system to enforce against whatever legal loopholes they manage to find each and every time something goes wrong, insurance could be run through multiple exchange operators and regulators, with the shared interest of having a reputable industry, keeping costs down, and taking care of Canadians. For example, a 4 of 7 multi-sig insurance fund held between 5 independent exchange operators and 2 regulatory bodies. All Canadian exchanges could pay premiums at a set rate based on their needed coverage, with a higher price paid for hot wallet coverage (anything not an air-gapped multi-sig cold wallet). Such a model would be much cheaper to manage, offer better coverage, and be much more reliable to payout when needed. The kind of coverage you could have under this model is unheard of. You could even create something like the CDIC to protect Canadians who get their trading accounts hacked if they can sufficiently prove the loss is legitimate. In cases of fraud, gross negligence, or insolvency, the fund can be used to pay affected users directly (utilizing the last transparent balance report in the worst case), something which private insurance would never touch. While it's recommended to have official policies for coverage, a model where members vote would fully cover edge cases. (Could be similar to the Supreme Court where justices vote based on case law.)
Such a model could fully protect all Canadians across all platforms. You can have a fiat coverage governed by legal agreements, and crypto-asset coverage governed by both multi-sig and legal agreements. It could be practical, affordable, and inclusive.

Now, we are at a crossroads. We can happily give up our freedom, our innovation, and our money. We can pay hefty expenses to auditors, lawyers, and regulators year after year (and make no mistake - this cost will grow to many millions or even billions as the industry grows - and it will be borne by all Canadians on every platform because platforms are not going to eat up these costs at a loss). We can make it nearly impossible for any new platform to enter the marketplace, forcing Canadians to use the same stagnant platforms year after year. We can centralize and consolidate the entire industry into 2 or 3 big players and have everyone else fail (possibly to heavy losses of users of those platforms). And when a flawed security model doesn't work and gets breached, we can make it even more complicated with even more people in suits making big money doing the job that blockchain was supposed to do in the first place. We can build a system which is so intertwined and dependent on big government, traditional finance, and central bankers that it's future depends entirely on that of the fiat system, of fractional banking, and of government bail-outs. If we choose this path, as history has shown us over and over again, we can not go back, save for revolution. Our children and grandchildren will still be paying the consequences of what we decided today.
Or, we can find solutions that work. We can maintain an open and innovative environment while making the adjustments we need to make to fully protect Canadian investors and cryptocurrency users, giving easy and affordable access to cryptocurrency for all Canadians on the platform of their choice, and creating an environment in which entrepreneurs and problem solvers can bring those solutions forward easily. None of the above precludes innovation in any way, or adds any unreasonable cost - and these three policies would demonstrably eliminate or resolve all 109 historic cases as studied here - that's every single case researched so far going back to 2011. It includes every loss that was studied so far not just in Canada but globally as well.
Unfortunately, finding answers is the least challenging part. Far more challenging is to get platform operators and regulators to agree on anything. My last post got no response whatsoever, and while the OSC has told me they're happy for industry feedback, I believe my opinion alone is fairly meaningless. This takes the whole community working together to solve. So please let me know your thoughts. Please take the time to upvote and share this with people. Please - let's get this solved and not leave it up to other people to do.

Facts/background/sources (skip if you like):

The inspiration for the paragraph about splitting wallets was an actual quote from a Canadian company providing custodial services in response to the OSC consultation paper: "We believe that it will be in the in best interests of investors to prohibit pooled crypto assets or ‘floats’. Most Platforms pool assets, citing reasons of practicality and expense. The recent hack of the world’s largest Platform – Binance – demonstrates the vulnerability of participants’ assets when such concessions are made. In this instance, the Platform’s entire hot wallet of Bitcoins, worth over $40 million, was stolen, facilitated in part by the pooling of client crypto assets." "the maintenance of participants (and Platform) crypto assets across multiple wallets distributes the related risk and responsibility of security - reducing the amount of insurance coverage required and making insurance coverage more readily obtainable". For the record, their reply also said nothing whatsoever about multi-sig or offline storage.
In addition to the fact that the $40m hack represented only one "hot wallet" of Binance, and they actually had the vast majority of assets in other wallets (including mostly cold wallets), multiple real cases have clearly demonstrated that risk is still present with multiple wallets. Bitfinex, VinDAX, Bithumb, Altsbit, BitPoint, Cryptopia, and just recently KuCoin all had multiple wallets breached all at the same time, and may represent a significantly larger impact on customers than the Binance breach which was fully covered by Binance. To represent that simply having multiple separate wallets under the same security scheme is a comprehensive way to reduce risk is just not true.
Private insurance has historically never covered a single loss in the cryptocurrency space (at least, not one that I was able to find), and there are notable cases where massive losses were not covered by insurance. Bitpay in 2015 and Yapizon in 2017 both had insurance policies that didn't pay out during the breach, even after a lengthly court process. The same insurance that ShakePay is presently using (and announced to much fanfare) was describe by their CEO himself as covering “physical theft of the media where the private keys are held,” which is something that has never historically happened. As was said with regard to the same policy in 2018 - “I don’t find it surprising that Lloyd’s is in this space,” said Johnson, adding that to his mind the challenge for everybody is figuring out how to structure these policies so that they are actually protective. “You can create an insurance policy that protects no one – you know there are so many caveats to the policy that it’s not super protective.”
The most profitable policy for a private insurance company is one with the most expensive premiums that they never have to pay a claim on. They have no inherent incentive to take care of people who lost funds. It's "cheaper" to take the reputational hit and fight the claim in court. The more money at stake, the more the insurance provider is incentivized to avoid payout. They're not going to insure the assets unless they have reasonable certainty to make a profit by doing so, and they're not going to pay out a massive sum unless it's legally forced. Private insurance is always structured to be maximally profitable to the insurance provider.
The circumvention of multi-sig was a key factor in the massive Bitfinex hack of over $60m of bitcoin, which today still sits being slowly used and is worth over $3b. While Bitfinex used a qualified custodian Bitgo, which was and still is active and one of the industry leaders of custodians, and they set up 2 of 3 multi-sig wallets, the entire system was routed through Bitfinex, such that Bitfinex customers could initiate the withdrawals in a "hot" fashion. This feature was also a hit with the hacker. The multi-sig was fully circumvented.
Bitpay in 2015 was another example of a breach that stole 5,000 bitcoins. This happened not through the exploit of any system in Bitpay, but because the CEO of a company they worked with got their computer hacked and the hackers were able to request multiple bitcoin purchases, which Bitpay honoured because they came from the customer's computer legitimately. Impersonation is a very common tactic used by fraudsters, and methods get more extreme all the time.
A notable case in Canada was the Canadian Bitcoins exploit. Funds were stored on a server in a Rogers Data Center, and the attendee was successfully convinced to reboot the server "in safe mode" with a simple phone call, thus bypassing the extensive security and enabling the theft.
Over $200m has been stolen impersonating users of cryptocurrency platforms by one group alone. Here's a list of 10 social engineering attacks against corporate companies. Here's an even larger case. While verification methods are improving, so are methods of identity theft and social engineering. We now have sim swapping and deep fake videos to contend with. Hackers have massive database sets of personal information they can utilize. As the sums at stake increase, so to will the level of effort criminals are willing to undertake. Obscurity for an insecure system will only postpone an attack until the "jackpot" is large enough.
The very nature of custodians circumvents multi-sig. This is because custodians are not just having to secure the assets against some sort of physical breach but against any form of social engineering, modification of orders, fraudulent withdrawal attempts, etc... If the security practices of signatories in a multi-sig arrangement are such that the breach risk of one signatory is 1 in 100, the requirement of 3 independent signatures makes the risk of theft 1 in 1,000,000. Since hackers tend to exploit the weakest link, a comparable custodian has to make the entry and exit points of their platform 10,000 times more secure than one of those signatories to provide equivalent protection. And if the signatories beef up their security by only 10x, the risk is now 1 in 1,000,000,000. The custodian has to be 1,000,000 times more secure. The larger and more complex a system is, the more potential vulnerabilities exist in it, and the fewer people can understand how the system works when performing upgrades. Even if a system is completely secure today, one has to also consider how that system might evolve over time or work with different members.
By contrast, offline multi-signature solutions have an extremely solid record, and in the entire history of cryptocurrency exchange incidents which I've studied (listed here), there has only been one incident (796 exchange in 2015) involving an offline multi-signature wallet. It happened because the customer's bitcoin address was modified by hackers, and the amount that was stolen ($230k) was immediately covered by the exchange operators. Basically, the platform operators were tricked into sending a legitimate withdrawal request to the wrong address because hackers exploited their platform to change that address. Such an issue would not be prevented in any way by the use of a custodian, as that custodian has no oversight whatsoever to the exchange platform. It's practical for all exchange operators to test large withdrawal transactions as a general policy, regardless of what model is used, and general best practice is to diagnose and fix such an exploit as soon as it occurs.
False promises on the backing of funds played a huge role in the downfall of Quadriga, and it's been exposed over and over again (MyCoin, PlusToken, Bitsane, Bitmarket, EZBTC, IDAX). Even today, customers have extremely limited certainty on whether their funds in exchanges are actually being backed or how they're being backed. While this issue is not unique to cryptocurrency exchanges, the complexity of the technology and the lack of any regulation or standards makes problems more widespread, and there is no "central bank" to come to the rescue as in the 2008 financial crisis or during the great depression when "9,000 banks failed".
In addition to fraudulent operations, the industry is full of cases where operators have suffered breaches and not reported them. Most recently, Einstein was the largest case in Canada, where ongoing breaches and fraud were perpetrated against the platform for multiple years and nobody found out until the platform collapsed completely. While fraud and breaches suck to deal with, they suck even more when not dealt with. Lack of visibility played a role in the largest downfalls of Mt. Gox, Cryptsy, and Bitgrail. In some cases, platforms are alleged to have suffered a hack and keep operating without admitting it at all, such as CoinBene.
It surprises some to learn that a cryptographic solution has already existed since 2013, and gained widespread support in 2014 after Mt. Gox. Proof of Reserves is a full cryptographic proof that allows any customer using an exchange to have complete certainty that their crypto-assets are fully backed by the platform in real-time. This is accomplished by proving that assets exist on the blockchain, are spendable, and fully cover customer deposits. It does not prove safety of assets or backing of fiat assets.
- If we didn't care about privacy at all, a platform could publish their wallet addresses, sign a partial transaction, and put the full list of customer information and balances out publicly. Customers can each check that they are on the list, that the balances are accurate, that the total adds up, and that it's backed and spendable on the blockchain. Platforms who exclude any customer take a risk because that customer can easily check and see they were excluded. So together with all customers checking, this forms a full proof of backing of all crypto assets.
- However, obviously customers care about their private information being published. Therefore, a hash of the information can be provided instead. Hash is one-way encryption. The hash allows the customer to validate inclusion (by hashing their own known information), while anyone looking at the list of hashes cannot determine the private information of any other user. All other parts of the scheme remain fully intact. A model like this is in use on the exchange CoinFloor in the UK.
- A Merkle tree can provide even greater privacy. Instead of a list of balances, the balances are arranged into a binary tree. A customer starts from their node, and works their way to the top of the tree. For example, they know they have 5 BTC, they plus 1 other customer hold 7 BTC, they plus 2-3 other customers hold 17 BTC, etc... until they reach the root where all the BTC are represented. Thus, there is no way to find the balances of other individual customers aside from one unidentified customer in this case.
Proposals such as this had the backing of leaders in the community including Nic Carter, Greg Maxwell, and Zak Wilcox. Substantial and significant effort started back in 2013, with massive popularity in 2014. But what became of that effort? Very little. Exchange operators continue to refuse to give visibility. Despite the fact this information can often be obtained through trivial blockchain analysis, no Canadian platform has ever provided any wallet addresses publicly. As described by the CEO of Newton "For us to implement some kind of realtime Proof of Reserves solution, which I'm not opposed to, it would have to ... Preserve our users' privacy, as well as our own. Some kind of zero-knowledge proof". Kraken describes here in more detail why they haven't implemented such a scheme. According to professor Eli Ben-Sasson, when he spoke with exchanges, none were interested in implementing Proof of Reserves.
And yet, Kraken's places their reasoning on a page called "Proof of Reserves". More recently, both BitBuy and ShakePay have released reports titled "Proof of Reserves and Security Audit". Both reports contain disclaimers against being audits. Both reports trust the customer list provided by the platform, leaving the open possibility that multiple large accounts could have been excluded from the process. Proof of Reserves is a blockchain validation where customers see the wallets on the blockchain. The report from Kraken is 5 years old, but they leave it described as though it was just done a few weeks ago. And look at what they expect customers to do for validation. When firms represent something being "Proof of Reserve" when it's not, this is like a farmer growing fruit with pesticides and selling it in a farmers market as organic produce - except that these are people's hard-earned life savings at risk here. Platforms are misrepresenting the level of visibility in place and deceiving the public by their misuse of this term. They haven't proven anything.
Fraud isn't a problem that is unique to cryptocurrency. Fraud happens all the time. Enron, WorldCom, Nortel, Bear Stearns, Wells Fargo, Moser Baer, Wirecard, Bre-X, and Nicola are just some of the cases where frauds became large enough to become a big deal (and there are so many countless others). These all happened on 100% reversible assets despite regulations being in place. In many of these cases, the problems happened due to the over-complexity of the financial instruments. For example, Enron had "complex financial statements [which] were confusing to shareholders and analysts", creating "off-balance-sheet vehicles, complex financing structures, and deals so bewildering that few people could understand them". In cryptocurrency, we are often combining complex financial products with complex technologies and verification processes. We are naïve if we think problems like this won't happen. It is awkward and uncomfortable for many people to admit that they don't know how something works. If we want "money of the people" to work, the solutions have to be simple enough that "the people" can understand them, not so confusing that financial professionals and technology experts struggle to use or understand them.
For those who question the extent to which an organization can fool their way into a security consultancy role, HB Gary should be a great example to look at. Prior to trying to out anonymous, HB Gary was being actively hired by multiple US government agencies and others in the private sector (with glowing testimonials). The published articles and hosted professional security conferences. One should also look at this list of data breaches from the past 2 years. Many of them are large corporations, government entities, and technology companies. These are the ones we know about. Undoubtedly, there are many more that we do not know about. If HB Gary hadn't been "outted" by anonymous, would we have known they were insecure? If the same breach had happened outside of the public spotlight, would it even have been reported? Or would HB Gary have just deleted the Twitter posts, brought their site back up, done a couple patches, and kept on operating as though nothing had happened?
In the case of Quadriga, the facts are clear. Despite past experience with platforms such as MapleChange in Canada and others around the world, no guidance or even the most basic of a framework was put in place by regulators. By not clarifying any sort of legal framework, regulators enabled a situation where a platform could be run by former criminal Mike Dhanini/Omar Patryn, and where funds could be held fully unchecked by one person. At the same time, the lack of regulation deterred legitimate entities from running competing platforms and Quadriga was granted a money services business license for multiple years of operation, which gave the firm the appearance of legitimacy. Regulators did little to protect Canadians despite Quadriga failing to file taxes from 2016 onward. The entire administrative team had resigned and this was public knowledge. Many people had suspicions of what was going on, including Ryan Mueller, who forwarded complaints to the authorities. These were ignored, giving Gerald Cotten the opportunity to escape without justice.
There are multiple issues with the SOC II model including the prohibitive cost (you have to find a third party accounting firm and the prices are not even listed publicly on any sites), the requirement of operating for a year (impossible for new platforms), and lack of any public visibility (SOC II are private reports that aren't shared outside the people in suits).
Securities frameworks are expensive. Sarbanes-Oxley is estimated to cost $5.1 million USD/yr for the average Fortune 500 company in the United States. Since "Fortune 500" represents the top 500 companies, that means well over $2.55 billion USD (~$3.4 billion CAD) is going to people in suits. Isn't the problem of trust and verification the exact problem that the blockchain is supposed to solve?
To use Quadriga as justification for why custodians or SOC II or other advanced schemes are needed for platforms is rather silly, when any framework or visibility at all, or even the most basic of storage policies, would have prevented the whole thing. It's just an embarrassment.
We are now seeing regulators take strong action. CoinSquare in Canada with multi-million dollar fines. BitMex from the US, criminal charges and arrests. OkEx, with full disregard of withdrawals and no communication. Who's next?
We have a unique window today where we can solve these problems, and not permanently destroy innovation with unreasonable expectations, but we need to act quickly. This is a unique historic time that will never come again.

Thoughts?

How To End The Cryptocurrency Exchange "Wild West" Without Crippling Innovation

In case you haven't noticed the consultation paper, staff notice, and report on Quadriga, regulators are now clamping down on Canadian cryptocurrency exchanges. The OSC and other regulatory bodies are still interested in industry feedback. They have not put forward any official regulation yet. Below are some ideas/insights and a proposed framework.

This framework was developed through a study of 96 past exchange hack/scam/fraud events. It prevents all historic cases where funds were lost in cryptocurrency exchanges.
Typical securities frameworks will cost Canadians millions of dollars (ie Sarbanes-Oxley estimated at $5m USD/yr per firm). Implementation costs of this proposal are significantly cheaper.
Canadians can maintain a diverse set of exchanges, multiple viable business models are still fully supported, and innovation is encouraged while keeping Canadians safe.

Many of you have limited time to read the full proposal, so here are the highlights:

Offline Multi-Signature

Effective standards to prevent both internal and external theft. Exchange operators are trained and certified, and have a legal responsibility to users.

Regular Transparent Audits

Provides visibility to Canadians that their funds are fully backed on the exchange, while protecting privacy and sensitive platform information.

Insurance Requirements

Establishment of basic insurance standards/strategy, to expand over time. Removing risk to exchange users of any hot wallet theft.

Background and Justifications

Cold Storage Custody/Management
After reviewing close to 100 cases, all thefts tend to break down into more or less the same set of problems:
• Funds stored online or in a smart contract,
• Access controlled by one person or one system,
• 51% attacks (rare),
• Funds sent to the wrong address (also rare), or
• Some combination of the above.
For the first two cases, practical solutions exist and are widely implemented on exchanges already. Offline multi-signature solutions are already industry standard. No cases studied found an external theft or exit scam involving an offline multi-signature wallet implementation. Security can be further improved through minimum numbers of signatories, background checks, providing autonomy and legal protections to each signatory, establishing best practices, and a training/certification program.
The last two transaction risks occur more rarely, and have never resulted in a loss affecting the actual users of the exchange. In all cases to date where operators made the mistake, they've been fully covered by the exchange platforms.
• 51% attacks generally only occur on blockchains with less security. The most prominent cases have been Bitcoin Gold and Ethereum Classic. The simple solution is to enforce deposit limits and block delays such that a 51% attack is not cost-effective.
• The risk of transactions to incorrect addresses can be eliminated by a simple test transaction policy on large transactions. By sending a small amount of funds prior to any large withdrawals/transfers as a standard practice, the accuracy of the wallet address can be validated.
The proposal covers all loss cases and goes beyond, while avoiding significant additional costs, risks, and limitations which may be associated with other frameworks like SOC II.

On The Subject of Third Party Custodians
Many Canadian platforms are currently experimenting with third party custody. From the standpoint of the exchange operator, they can liberate themselves from some responsibility of custody, passing that off to someone else. For regulators, it puts crypto in similar categorization to oil, gold, and other commodities, with some common standards. Platform users would likely feel greater confidence if the custodian was a brand they recognized. If the custodian was knowledgeable and had a decent team that employed multi-sig, they could keep assets safe from internal theft. With the right protections in place, this could be a great solution for many exchanges, particularly those that lack the relevant experience or human resources for their own custody systems.
However, this system is vulnerable to anyone able to impersonate the exchange operators. You may have a situation where different employees who don't know each other that well are interacting between different companies (both the custodian and all their customers which presumably isn't just one exchange). A case study of what can go wrong in this type of environment might be Bitpay, where the CEO was tricked out of 5000 bitcoins over 3 separate payments by a series of emails sent legitimately from a breached computer of another company CEO. It's also still vulnerable to the platform being compromised, as in the really large $70M Bitfinex hack, where the third party Bitgo held one key in a multi-sig wallet. The hacker simply authorized the withdrawal using the same credentials as Bitfinex (requesting Bitgo to sign multiple withdrawal transactions). This succeeded even with the use of multi-sig and two heavily security-focused companies, due to the lack of human oversight (basically, hot wallet). Of course, you can learn from these cases and improve the security, but so can hackers improve their deception and at the end of the day, both of these would have been stopped by the much simpler solution of a qualified team who knew each other and employed multi-sig with properly protected keys. It's pretty hard to beat a human being who knows the business and the typical customer behaviour (or even knows their customers personally) at spotting fraud, and the proposed multi-sig means any hacker has to get through the scrutiny of 3 (or more) separate people, all of whom would have proper training including historical case studies.
There are strong arguments both for and against using use of third party custodians. The proposal sets mandatory minimum custody standards would apply regardless if the cold wallet signatories are exchange operators, independent custodians, or a mix of both.

On The Subject Of Insurance
ShakePay has taken the first steps into this new realm (congratulations). There is no question that crypto users could be better protected by the right insurance policies, and it certainly feels better to transact with insured platforms. The steps required to obtain insurance generally place attention in valuable security areas, and in this case included a review from CipherTrace. One of the key solutions in traditional finance comes from insurance from entities such as the CDIC.
However, historically, there wasn't found any actual insurance payout to any cryptocurrency exchange, and there are notable cases where insurance has not paid. With Bitpay, for example, the insurance agent refused because the issue happened to the third party CEO's computer instead of anything to do with Bitpay itself. With the Youbit exchange in South Korea, their insurance claim was denied, and the exchange ultimately ended up instead going bankrupt with all user's funds lost. To quote Matt Johnson in the original Lloyd's article: “You can create an insurance policy that protects no one – you know there are so many caveats to the policy that it’s not super protective.”
ShakePay's insurance was only reported to cover their cold storage, and “physical theft of the media where the private keys are held”. Physical theft has never, in the history of cryptocurrency exchange cases reviewed, been reported as the cause of loss. From the limited information of the article, ShakePay made it clear their funds are in the hands of a single US custodian, and at least part of their security strategy is to "decline[] to confirm the custodian’s name on the record". While this prevents scrutiny of the custodian, it's pretty silly to speculate that a reasonably competent hacking group couldn't determine who the custodian is. A far more common infiltration strategy historically would be social engineering, which has succeeded repeatedly. A hacker could trick their way into ShakePay's systems and request a fraudulent withdrawal, impersonate ShakePay and request the custodian to move funds, or socially engineer their way into the custodian to initiate the withdrawal of multiple accounts (a payout much larger than ShakePay) exploiting the standard procedures (for example, fraudulently initiating or override the wallet addresses of a real transfer). In each case, nothing was physically stolen and the loss is therefore not covered by insurance.
In order for any insurance to be effective, clear policies have to be established about what needs to be covered. Anything short of that gives Canadians false confidence that they are protected when they aren't in any meaningful way. At this time, the third party insurance market does not appear to provide adequate options or coverage, and effort is necessary to standardize custody standards, which is a likely first step in ultimately setting up an insurance framework.
A better solution compared to third party insurance providers might be for Canadian exchange operators to create their own collective insurance fund, or a specific federal organization similar to the CDIC. Such an organization would have a greater interest or obligation in paying out actual cases, and that would be it's purpose rather than maximizing it's own profit. This would be similar to the SAFU which Binance has launched, except it would cover multiple exchanges. There is little question whether the SAFU would pay out given a breach of Binance, and a similar argument could be made for a insurance fund managed by a collective of exchange operators or a government organization. While a third party insurance provider has the strong market incentive to provide the absolute minimum coverage and no market incentive to payout, an entity managed by exchange operators would have incentive to protect the reputation of exchange operators/the industry, and the government should have the interest of protecting Canadians.

On The Subject of Fractional Reserve
There is a long history of fractional reserve failures, from the first banks in ancient times, through the great depression (where hundreds of fractional reserve banks failed), right through to the 2008 banking collapse referenced in the first bitcoin block. The fractional reserve system allows banks to multiply the money supply far beyond the actual cash (or other assets) in existence, backed only by a system of debt obligations of others. Safely supporting a fractional reserve system is a topic of far greater complexity than can be addressed by a simple policy, and when it comes to cryptocurrency, there is presently no entity reasonably able to bail anyone out in the event of failure. Therefore, this framework is addressed around entities that aim to maintain 100% backing of funds.
There may be some firms that desire but have failed to maintain 100% backing. In this case, there are multiple solutions, including outside investment, merging with other exchanges, or enforcing a gradual restoration plan. All of these solutions are typically far better than shutting down the exchange, and there are multiple cases where they've been used successfully in the past.

Proof of Reserves/Transparency/Accountability
Canadians need to have visibility into the backing on an ongoing basis.
The best solution for crypto-assets is a Proof of Reserve. Such ideas go back all the way to 2013, before even Mt. Gox. However, no Canadian exchange has yet implemented such a system, and only a few international exchanges (CoinFloor in the UK being an example) have. Many firms like Kraken, BitBuy, and now ShakePay use the Proof of Reserve term to refer to lesser proofs which do not actually cryptographically prove the full backing of all user assets on the blockchain. In order for a Proof of Reserve to be effective, it must actually be a complete proof, and it needs to be understood by the public that is expected to use it. Many firms have expressed reservations about the level of transparency required in a complete Proof of Reserve (for example Kraken here). While a complete Proof of Reserves should be encouraged, and there are some solutions in the works (ie TxQuick), this is unlikely to be suitable universally for all exchange operators and users.
Given the limitations, and that firms also manage fiat assets, a more traditional audit process makes more sense. Some Canadian exchanges (CoinSquare, CoinBerry) have already subjected themselves to annual audits. However, these results are not presently shared publicly, and there is no guarantee over the process including all user assets or the integrity and independence of the auditor. The auditor has been typically not known, and in some cases, the identity of the auditor is protected by a NDA. Only in one case (BitBuy) was an actual report generated and publicly shared. There has been no attempt made to validate that user accounts provided during these audits have been complete or accurate. A fraudulent fractional exchange, or one which had suffered a breach they were unwilling to publicly accept (see CoinBene), could easily maintain a second set of books for auditors or simply exclude key accounts to pass an individual audit.
The proposed solution would see a reporting standard which includes at a minimum - percentage of backing for each asset relative to account balances and the nature of how those assets are stored, with ownership proven by the auditor. The auditor would also publicly provide a "hash list", which they independently generate from the accounts provided by the exchange. Every exchange user can then check their information against this public "hash list". A hash is a one-way form of encryption, which fully protects the private information, yet allows anyone who knows that information already to validate that it was included. Less experienced users can take advantage of public tools to calculate the hash from their information (provided by the exchange), and thus have certainty that the auditor received their full balance information. Easy instructions can be provided.
Auditors should be impartial, their identities and process public, and they should be rotated so that the same auditor is never used twice in a row. Balancing the cost of auditing against the needs for regular updates, a 6 month cycle likely makes the most sense.

Hot Wallet Management
The best solution for hot wallets is not to use them. CoinBerry reportedly uses multi-sig on all withdrawals, and Bitmex is an international example known for their structure devoid of hot wallets.
However, many platforms and customers desire fast withdrawal processes, and human validation has a cost of time and delay in this process.
A model of self-insurance or separate funds for hot wallets may be used in these cases. Under this model, a platform still has 100% of their client balance in cold storage and holds additional funds in hot wallets for quick withdrawal. Thus, the risk of those hot wallets is 100% on exchange operators and not affecting the exchange users. Since most platforms typically only have 1%-5% in hot wallets at any given time, it shouldn't be unreasonable to build/maintain these additional reserves over time using exchange fees or additional investment. Larger withdrawals would still be handled at regular intervals from the cold storage.
Hot wallet risks have historically posed a large risk and there is no established standard to guarantee secure hot wallets. When the government of South Korea dispatched security inspections to multiple exchanges, the results were still that 3 of them got hacked after the inspections. If standards develop such that an organization in the market is willing to insure the hot wallets, this could provide an acceptable alternative. Another option may be for multiple exchange operators to pool funds aside for a hot wallet insurance fund. Comprehensive coverage standards must be established and maintained for all hot wallet balances to make sure Canadians are adequately protected.

Current Draft Proposal

(1) Proper multi-signature cold wallet storage.
(a) Each private key is the personal and legal responsibility of one person - the “signatory”. Signatories have special rights and responsibilities to protect user assets. Signatories are trained and certified through a course covering (1) past hacking and fraud cases, (2) proper and secure key generation, and (3) proper safekeeping of private keys. All private keys must be generated and stored 100% offline by the signatory. If even one private keys is ever breached or suspected to be breached, the wallet must be regenerated and all funds relocated to a new wallet.
(b) All signatories must be separate background-checked individuals free of past criminal conviction. Canadians should have a right to know who holds their funds. All signing of transactions must take place with all signatories on Canadian soil or on the soil of a country with a solid legal system which agrees to uphold and support these rules (from an established white-list of countries which expands over time).
(c) 3-5 independent signatures are required for any withdrawal. There must be 1-3 spare signatories, and a maximum of 7 total signatories. The following are all valid combinations: 3of4, 3of5, 3of6, 4of5, 4of6, 4of7, 5of6, or 5of7.
(d) A security audit should be conducted to validate the cold wallet is set up correctly and provide any additional pertinent information. The primary purpose is to ensure that all signatories are acting independently and using best practices for private key storage. A report summarizing all steps taken and who did the audit will be made public. Canadians must be able to validate the right measures are in place to protect their funds.
(e) There is a simple approval process if signatories wish to visit any country outside Canada, with a potential whitelist of exempt countries. At most 2 signatories can be outside of aligned jurisdiction at any given time. All exchanges would be required to keep a compliant cold wallet for Canadian funds and have a Canadian office if they wish to serve Canadian customers.
(2) Regular and transparent solvency audits.
(a) An audit must be conducted at founding, after 3 months of operation, and at least once every 6 months to compare customer balances against all stored cryptocurrency and fiat balances. The auditor must be known, independent, and never the same twice in a row.
(b) An audit report will be published featuring the steps conducted in a readable format. This should be made available to all Canadians on the exchange website and on a government website. The report must include what percentage of each customer asset is backed on the exchange, and how those funds are stored.
(c) The auditor will independently produce a hash of each customer's identifying information and balance as they perform the audit. This will be made publicly available on the exchange and government website, along with simplified instructions that each customer can use to verify that their balance was included in the audit process.
(d) The audit needs to include a proof of ownership for any cryptocurrency wallets included. A satoshi test (spending a small amount) or partially signed transaction both qualify.
(e) Any platform without 100% reserves should be assessed on a regular basis by a government or industry watchdog. This entity should work to prevent any further drop, support any private investor to come in, or facilitate a merger so that 100% backing can be obtained as soon as possible.
(3) Protections for hot wallets and transactions.
(a) A standardized list of approved coins and procedures will be established to constitute valid cold storage wallets. Where a multi-sig process is not natively available, efforts will be undertaken to establish a suitable and stable smart contract standard. This list will be expanded and improved over time. Coins and procedures not on the list are considered hot wallets.
(b) Hot wallets can be backed by additional funds in cold storage or an acceptable third-party insurance provider with a comprehensive coverage policy.
(c) Exchanges are required to cover the full balance of all user funds as denominated in the same currency, or double the balance as denominated in bitcoin or CAD using an established trading rate. If the balance is ever insufficient due to market movements, the firm must rectify this within 24 hours by moving assets to cold storage or increasing insurance coverage.
(d) Any large transactions (above a set threshold) from cold storage to any new wallet addresses (not previously transacted with) must be tested with a smaller transaction first. Deposits of cryptocurrency must be limited to prevent economic 51% attacks. Any issues are to be covered by the exchange.
(e) Exchange platforms must provide suitable authentication for users, including making available approved forms of two-factor authentication. SMS-based authentication is not to be supported. Withdrawals must be blocked for 48 hours in the event of any account password change. Disputes on the negligence of exchanges should be governed by case law.

Steps Forward

Continued review of existing OSC feedback is still underway. More feedback and opinions on the framework and ideas as presented here are extremely valuable. The above is a draft and not finalized.
The process of further developing and bringing a suitable framework to protect Canadians will require the support of exchange operators, legal experts, and many others in the community. The costs of not doing such are tremendous. A large and convoluted framework, one based on flawed ideas or implementation, or one which fails to properly safeguard Canadians is not just extremely expensive and risky for all Canadians, severely limiting to the credibility and reputation of the industry, but an existential risk to many exchanges.
The responsibility falls to all of us to provide our insight and make our opinions heard on this critical matter. Please take the time to give your thoughts.

ColossusXT Q2 2020 AMA Ends!

Thank you for being a part of the ColossusXT Q2 2020 AMA! Below we will summarize the questions and answers. The team responded to 46 questions! If your question was not included, it may have been answered in a previous question or AMA. The ColossusXT team will do a Reddit AMA at the end of every quarter.
The winner of the AMA contest is: ookhimself
Congratulations. I will send you a DM on Reddit.
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Q: Why does your blockchain exist and what makes it unique?
A: ColossusXT exists to provide an energy-efficient method of supercomputing. ColossusXT is unique in many ways. Some coins have 1 layer of privacy. ColossusXT and the Colossus Grid will utilize 2 layers of privacy through Obfuscation Zerocoin Protocol, and I2P and these will protect users of the Colossus Grid as they utilize the grid resources. There are also Masternodes and Proof of Stake which both can contribute to reducing 51% attacks, along with instant transactions and zero-fee transactions. This protection is paramount as ColossusXT evolves into the Colossus Grid. Grid Computing will have a pivotal role throughout the world, and what this means is that users will begin to experience the Internet as a seamless computational universe. Software applications, databases, sensors, video, and audio streams-all will be reborn as services that live in cyberspace, assembling, and reassembling themselves on the fly to meet the tasks at hand. Once plugged into the grid, a desktop machine will draw computational horsepower from all the other computers on the grid.
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Q: What is the Colossus Grid?
A: ColossusXT is an anonymous blockchain through obfuscation, along with utilization of I2P (Armis). These features will protect end-user privacy as ColossusXT evolves into the Colossus Grid. The Colossus Grid will connect devices in a peer-to-peer network enabling users and applications to rent the cycles and storage of other users’ machines. This marketplace of computing power and storage will exclusively run on COLX currency. These resources will be used to complete tasks requiring any amount of computation time and capacity, or allow end-users to store data anonymously across the COLX decentralized network. Today, such resources are supplied by entities such as centralized cloud providers which are constrained by closed networks, proprietary payment systems, and hard-coded provisioning operations. Any user ranging from a single PC owner to a large data center can share resources through Colossus Grid and get paid in COLX for their contributions. Renters of computing power or storage space, on the other hand, may do so at low prices compared to the usual market prices because they are only using resources that already exist.
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Q: Is there any estimated date for the grid? What will set you apart from the opposition?
A: We are hoping to have something released for the community in Q4 this year. The difference between other competitors is that ColossusXT is putting consumer privacy first and we’re actively in the process of working with federal and state agencies in the United States.
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Q: How do you plan to get people to implement the technology? At your current rate of development, when do you foresee a minimum viable product being available?
A: We have been strategically networking with businesses, and we are currently undergoing the verification process in the United States to make bids on federal and state projects. We are working on an MVP and our goal is to have at least a portion of the Colossus Grid ready by Q4 2020.
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Q: When we can expect any use-case for COLX? A company or service that uses COLX for its activities/tasks.
A: We’re aiming for Q4 of this year to have an MVP, throughout 2021 we will be strategically making bids on federal and state contracts in the United States with a goal to expand operations exponentially.
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Q: Are there any plans to be listed on the more prominent exchanges e.g binance, kraken?
A: Yes, we have applied to some of these exchanges that are considered Tier 1 or Tier 2 exchanges. Many of them upfront will tell you there are no fees associated with the listing, that is not entirely true most of the time. Regardless, have applied and are awaiting more responses as we move forward. Listing on these exchanges often requires that we cannot announce this information until ColossusXT is live on its platform.
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Q: Partnerships are the norm these days in crypto world. Which partnership would you consider feasible, if any, in order to grow the Colossus Grid project?
A: The Colossus Grid is a huge undertaking both in development and business partnerships. We are moving in both these directions strategically. One of the most important partnerships is not really a partnership but approval to bid on state and federal contracts. Working with the governments around the world will be a big part of the Colossus Grid use-case.
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Q: If the ability to annonymise coins is turned off, can CLX still be marketed as a privacy coin? Do we have a date we can start using this feature again?
A: Yes and No. It’s frustrating right now having a lack of privacy for consumers as we don’t see privacy as a feature but a right. EVERY platform online should have some levels of privacy for their consumers, especially as technology continues to evolve and bad actors continue to use your personal information for their own nefarious purposes. Obfuscation will be implemented in the coming weeks, and Armis will follow suit shortly thereafter.
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Q: When can we expect the grid to come out?
A: We are looking at releasing an MVP towards the end of the year. Stay tuned during Q3 and Q4 as we ramp on technical and business developments.
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Q: Can you tell the current budget for development work?
A: Much of the development work budget comes from Core team member's disposable income, we also use the self-funding treasury that Masternode owners vote on each month.
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Q: Will cold staking be implemented somedays? I like the model of Cardano. Hope you will implement kind of Cardano staking in our wallet. I would love the easiness.
A: ColossusXT staking has been enabled since 2017. We have calculators on the website that will estimate your average staking returns and you can join numerous pools to increase your staking power within the pools. Cold staking is on our radar and will make it into the roadmap when our budget allows us.
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Q: Which part of grid technology are you planning first to go live? Storage/RAM/CPU/GPU/all at once? Separately?
A: We will be rolling the Colossus Grid out in two phases. The first phase will be storage, and then we will roll out computing power (RAM/CPU/GPU).
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Q: Is Armis I2P technology in development testphase I mean, I have read something like that… If Armis goes live, will there be some kind of option in deskopt wallet to transfer anonymous or will every transaction be fully anonymous like e.g. monero?
A: We recently had a testing phase with the community earlier this year, there will be another test phase with community participants who sign up. If you’re interested in this stay tuned on our socials and apply when the next testing phase happens All transactions will be fully anonymous behind Armis.
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Q: What programming languate is being used for developing COLX? How well this programming language do you think is more suitable for developing crypto, in comparison with other programing languages?
A: C++ is what we’re using at ColossusXT. Each crypto project is different but with what we're developing at ColossusXT. We are best suited to utilize C++.
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Q: What is the second biggest milestone other than launching the grid network for the team. What do you think of your competition like Golem network?
A: Armis will be a big milestone, and I don’t think we go back to our Polis partnership which allows users in Europe and Mexico (they do plan to expand to the US and other countries) the ability to spend their ColossusXT (COLX) wherever Mastercard is accepted. I don’t think the Golem network is taking consumer privacy far enough, in the blockchain industry I also see a lack of drive to push adoption within the United States. This is likely due to unclear regulations right now. ColossusXT is at the forefront of these issues and we intend to lead blockchain through these somewhat murky waters.
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Q: I don’t have a lot of knowledge about crypto-technology… but are there any risks of sensitive data-hijacks through Colx infrastructure? Will the Colx-grid be available for individuals or only larger corporations, and how would one get access to the computing power?
A: There are always risks with technology. We are doing extensive testing and more testing prior to releasing anything. Consumer privacy is apart of the foundation of what we’re building at ColossusXT and we want to ensure any and all of your personal information is secure and private. As technology evolves, we will be right here evolving with it to ensure that consumer privacy protections are always in place.
The Colossus Grid will be available to anyone with a computer. You will access it through the desktop wallet.
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Q: Do you have any new exchange listings planned in the near future?
A: Yes, but unfortunately with these things, every day it’s not something we can often say before the exchange makes their own announcements. If you have certain exchanges that you prefer, do not be shy and tag us on Twitter letting us and the exchange know. You can also reach us everyday at all hours of the day and night on Discord and Telegram.
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Q: Given that Colx had no ICO, are we able to ramp development efforts in case we have potential partnership deal on the table?
A: It really depends. We strategically spend every dime we spend on development. We do not like even a single penny to be waisted, so we don’t move as fast as the projects that raised millions of dollars, but we continue moving none the less. Ramping up our development is something we are working on by securing additional funding and we’re currently working on securing funding. 😊
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Q: How is the project development advancing? What are your plans for the next 5 years and what more can we expect from ColossusXT?
A: Our development is continuing on at a steady pace, we’re looking to ramp this up over the next year as the Colossus Grid will take much of our time but we’re excited. Over the next 5 years, you can expect the Colossus Grid to be live in all forms (storage and computing power), Armis will be released and we will share many technical details on how this consumer privacy protection rivals some of the other privacy protections in the blockchain industry. We expect to be verified and approved to work with the agencies in the United States long before then as well and will be aggressively pursuing federal contracts to utilize the computing power of the Colossus Grid. In 5 years, we plan to be a key player not just in the blockchain industry, but throughout the world. If you do not know ColossusXT now, expect to in 5 years or less.
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Q: Users often care less about technology, but rather the value of the token. How do you manage to strike a balance between developing the technology and also improving the value of COLX? There are so many privacy coins now, all of them claiming to have better features that ColossusXT. Moving forward, what do the next 10 years look like for ColossusXT in navigating the wave of privacy projects coming. How can ColossusXT continue to shine in the midst of seemingly legit projects that have come to challenge ColossusXT like mimblewimble projects and Monero, Zcoin, ect.?

A: The Colossus Grid and Masternodes will have a strong relationship with each other. When the Colossus Grid goes live we expect the masternode demand to continue to rise. Masternodes are a great incentive mechanism to increase network strength and will play an important role within the Colossus Grid. The more masternodes online, the less available coins in the circulating supply; which we expect will eventually reflect ColossusXT (COLX) coin value.
Over the next 10 years, ColossusXT (COLX) will solidify itself as a key player in the blockchain industry, and outside the blockchain industry. Following our strategic business plans, we intend to be one of the first, if not the first to truly bring government and other businesses into the blockchain industry through the Colossus Grid. Armis will be our defining privacy feature, which we expect in time will begin to be adopted by other projects. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: How have the number of Masternodes (MNs) increased/decreased over time/in the past few years? What proportion (%) of MNs actively take part in Governance? How do you see the number of MNs increasing/decreasing in the next couple of years? Is there a trend upwards or downwards?
Is there a specific number (or range) of MNs the team would like to attain ideally? Is it better to have as many MNs as possible or is there a point at which too many MNs start to have an adverse effect on the performance of the blockchain?
Hope this wasn’t too many questions in one :), Ahmed

A: The number of masternodes in the active network is more or less the same, fluctuating around 200-220. About 40% - 50% of masternodes participate actively in governance (see https://governance.colossusxt.io). We expect a number of masternodes to grow as they will have additional benefits with Colossus Grid (see business plan: http://bit.ly/COLXBPLive).
As the team had no premines, only the dev fund can be used for masternodes which is hard to maintain due to actual budget flow. It’s better to have as many masternodes as possible for the network, there is no adverse effect.
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Q: Of all the milestones that $COLX has achieved since your humble beginnings, which do you consider to be the best of it all? What achievements do you feel proud most?
A: It’s often not mentioned but I’m very proud of our partnership with PolisPay, which allows ColossusXT community members to purchase Amazon, Spotify, and other gift cards with ColossusXT (COLX) through the Polis platform. You are also able to spend your COLX anywhere Mastercard is accepted, the card is available only for EU citizens right now and the Polis team hopes to bring in other countries in the future.
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Q: There are problems that can slow down the course of a project such as the emergence of globalization, given the tighter budget, shorter implementation time requirements. My question is, How does $COLX resolve the issue?

A: Given the current situations around the world the Colossus Grid has more value than it ever has, and that value will continue to grow once we have released the Colossus Grid for consumers to share and utilize resources. You can already see from the [email protected] initiative that people are eager to share their computing resources to help researchers simulate different COVID19 simulations. We’ve always worked on a very small budget at ColossusXT starting with 0$ in funding and no pre-mine or ICO/IEO. This project was built for the community by the community, and as of lately we’ve actually been ramping up our business strategies and developments. Since we have all already worked remotely before the COVID19 pandemic, it interestingly allowed us more time to focus and achieve these goals as our day jobs allowed us to spend more time on ColossusXT.
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Q: How will you fight with regulators who are trying to stop privacy coins?

A: We have an amazing legal team at ColossusXT, and they are on top of any new law or regulation that comes out. We’re not afraid of regulators and our legal team makes sure that everything we do for ColossusXT is law-abiding. It's time the world stops looking at privacy as a feature and as a right, especially when you read about different applications and platforms using your personal DATA for their benefit. ColossusXT will continue to push this, and we're prepared to lobby this to lawmakers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Q: What type of utilities can $COLX give to users over its competitors like GOLM (computation) or STORJ (Data)?

A: The Colossus Grid has some major differences between Golem and Storj. One we’re a privacy-focused project. If you take a look at many of these applications and platforms today, in some way or another you’re giving up personal information, and/or geographic information. ColossusXT is focused on protecting consumer information, we do not look at privacy as a feature, we see privacy as a right, especially in the tech world today.
The second part of this question is that we’re currently in the verification process of registering with the United States federal and state governments so that we can legally bid on federal and state projects and work with different agencies. This will ensure that as the community members are sharing their idle resources, large corporations and businesses are using it. I’m not aware of the mentioned projects being registered in the United States or taking steps to work with the United States government.
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Q: How will computing power and storage sharing look like, for an average user (marketplace, program download)? What are you currently working on, when can we expect MVP? TY
A: The marketplace and Colossus Grid will be inside the ColossusXT desktop wallet that you currently have now. The UI/UX will change some to allow the additional settings and tabs that will become available and we’re preparing an MVP right now and we hope to share those details with you over the next few months, ask us again in the Q3 AMA if you haven’t seen anything yet :)
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Q: What would you say is the $COLX killer feature that sets it apart from the rest of the competition.
A: We believe that Armis is our killer feature. We recently had a beta this year with the community and will be moving forward later this year with Armis. ColossusXT consumers will have their geographic location and IP fully hidden behind the Armis layer for further security and anonymity for the transactions which will also take place in the Colossus Grid resource marketplace in the future.
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Q: I have been a silent follower of $COLX and I must say that I'm truly impressed with how the team has been diligently working on the project. It'd be nice to have the community be part of something like a bounty or a social awareness contest. As this will not only attract more users to the platform but would also strengthen the bond within the community. When can we possibly expect a community project of this level? #spreadthegrid
A: We currently have a Gleam competition ongoing for social awareness, and we just hired a community manager to spread more community awareness and will be rolling on competitions more regularly. Every quarter we have an AMA on Reddit for the community to ask questions, or just gripe at us, and one person each quarter is awarded 100,000 COLX for participating in the AMA. As we deliver our targets and grow, we will shift more funds from development funds to marketing funds to raise further awareness.
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Q: "Our main competitor is crypto adoption. We are all here to make it happen together.", this is quoted from a founder of a known crypto wallet. Do you see competition as something that strengthens the project as a whole or as a possible distraction due to pressure to be at the top of the crypto ecosystem?

A: This is a two scenario situation. Competition is good for ColossusXT, and we look at our main competitor in blockchain as Golem (GNT), having said that though too much competition or sometimes maximalist behavior isn’t good for crypto, many of these projects should be coming together to lobby lawmakers for laws and regulations that are good for the blockchain industry, as this is still an emerging market and the laws and regulations aren’t exactly in place at this time.
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Q: "For people to believe in crypto, they need to understand the tangible benefits it offers to our society.", a remark made by a crypto project in the past. What exactly would be $COLX real life global benefits? And how do you plan on achieving this?
A: ColossusXT vision will be achievable when the Colossus Grid is released. We are currently in the process of registering with state and federal agencies in the United States, once we are registered to work with these agencies we will pursue contracts with the government, cybersecurity firms and colleges all around the United States, and the world to utilize the resources on the Colossus Grid. We’ve already started building business relationships for this very purpose.
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Q: According to you how much time will it take for $COLX to get into mainstream adoption and execute all the plans set for this project?
A: It’s almost impossible to set a timeline on when the world/people will begin to adopt ColossusXT (COLX) and the Colossus Grid. We don’t believe that adoption for ColossusXT will happen before the Colossus Grid is live, and if I gave you an exact timeline for when or how long it will take you for the Colossus Grid to be adopted I would be lying to you, but we are already forming business relationships and making strategic moves to be able to bid, and work with state and federal agencies in the United States.
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Q: Does Tokens.net plan any kind of staking ($COLX or other coins)?
A: We will reach out to the tokens.net team and see if they have any plans to allow staking.
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Q: How will you try to boost adoption of #COLX, how do you think you will motivate programmers to join opensource project?
A: The Colossus Grid will be available for anyone to use, or share their idle resources for other consumers to use. We will be focusing on providing these resources to state and federal governments, cybersecurity firms, and researchers all across the world. Certainly, we expect some community members to use these resources to mine different PoW cryptocurrencies, but the team at ColossusXT will be focused on bringing in large colleges and universities as well as big cybersecurity businesses that may need supercomputing power at 1/10th of the current prices. Our programmers are our only paid team members, and we pay them at a competitive rate. We’re looking to bring in some more programmers later this year.
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Q: Do you have any special development funds for programmers?
A: Sometimes we pay our programmers out of our own pocket, sometimes we pay them in ColossusXT. It really depends on what kind of agreements have been made. We have been aggressively pursuing different funding opportunities throughout 2020 so that we can expand our development team and in the future, we may have incentives to drive programmers into joining our team. Right now we just stick to a competitive pay scale within the industry.
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Q: Why Android Wallet Revision hasn't been done? Any problems?
A: The Android wallet revision took some time to be approved in the Google Playstore, but it has been released and live since June 15, 2020.
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Q: Whats the second biggest milestone other than the grid network for COLX team?
A: Armis is likely to be considered our second biggest milestone this year, although as I mentioned above this can easily be overshadowed by our Polis partnership which allows you to spend ColossusXT (COLX) anywhere Mastercard is accepted. Although the epay debit card ownership is currently restricted to certain countries (EU zone only), these restrictions will lift in time.
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Q: How is COLX team going to contribute to crypto adoption, other than building a robust network?
A: We’re already in the process of verification to work with state and federal agencies. Adoption for blockchain projects isn’t going to move fast. I read a report just a few days ago about how scammers in the crypto industry stole over 2 million dollars worth of crypto just from the “Elon Musk” impersonations on Twitter.
We will continue to build our network, and seek out state and federal agencies as well as private cybersecurity firms that can utilize the Colossus Grid, we’re not just focused on making noise on social media, we intend to make noise throughout the entire world.
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Q: Are their industry partners to COLX that are awaiting your network to go live?
A: Yes, although I hesitate to go into too much detail here. We are talking with business leaders.
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Q: The ongoing crisis affected the market badly, making many projects far from their targets. What is $COLX strategy in order to survive and pass through this crisis?
A: I agree it affected the market badly, especially the projects that raised hundreds of millions of dollars in crypto and held it through the entire market correction. ColossusXT strategy is different from those affected, we’ve always had a smaller budget than these large projects. We spend the money we have available very wisely, and we’re not in a hurry to grab something that sounds good without doing our due diligence. We make our moves very strategically.
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Q: I gotta ask, what made $COLX decide to get listed on Tokens.net? What beneficial advantage does $COLX get in doing so? How about Tokens.net?
A: Tokens.Net is one of the best exchanges ColossusXT is listed at the moment in comparison to others in terms of volume.

Tokens.net is one of the most secure and transparent exchanges out there, registered in the UK.
The team behind the exchange has deep roots in the crypto/blockchain space, it was co-founded by Damian Merlak, a crypto-pioneer and co-founder of Bitstamp.
Tokens.net provides free auto-trading tool / Market Making Bot. Their Dynamic Trading Rights concept adds transparency to trading volumes.
They allow the community voting option of only truly decentralized projects after a thorough screening.

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Q: Hey everyone! What is the main purpose of the coin $COLX, does it have its own chain or is it some sort of an ERC-20 token? Thank you for the answers.
A: ColossusXT has never been an ERC-20 coin. We have been operating on our own mainnet since 2017. The purpose of ColossusXT (COLX) is to be the native currency of the Colossus Grid. This will allow users to share their idle resources on their computers, and consumers will rent/buy those resources to complete whatever they intend to use them for, from processing large DATA to running scientific simulations, to even mining PoW cryptocurrencies.
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Q: When we can expect any usecase for COLX? A company or service that uses colx for its activities / tasks.
A: There are currently use cases now if your location allows you to utilize the Polis Pay app, or if you have a Polis Pay card you can buy things with ColossusXT (COLX). I myself have tested the card buying gas at a gas station. These are not ColossusXT’s primary focus though and much of our use case will not start until the Colossus Grid is live.
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Q: What pairs will colx have to trade with on tokens.net // Will you connect #COLX with USDT EURS or BTC?
A: ColossusXT will be initially paired with Bitcoin (BTC). If the community would like different pairs, they can certainly request them and we will reach out to tokens.net and work to facilitate requests.
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Q: Will you try to convince users to trade on tokens.net if so how will you do it?
A: There is currently a gleam competition for users to sign up and trade on tokens.net. We “shill” tokens.net accordingly through social media to the ColossusXT community, but can’t really convince anyone to use a certain exchange, although we will try to push as many members to tokens.net as we can. We have many masternode holders who reside in the United States and they are not yet allowed to trade on tokens.net.
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Q: How will you try to create liquidity for your pairs?
A: We would like to increase the adoption rate with real-world partnerships such as our partnership with PolisPay for the use of gift/debit cards. As the liquidity is linked with the use cases, supply/demand mechanics, we are also preparing to provide additional use cases of COLX for the crypto world in an innovative & pioneering way; for the time being, we can hint this as a side business till we deliver fully operational Colossus Grid.
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Q: How big is a development team of #COLX?
A: The ColossusXT team is probably bigger than some people realize, partly because many of the team members are very private. We have 9 core members, 2 in-house developers, 3 Colossus Grid architects, and 2 Colossus Grid developers.
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Q: Do you have some security guys in the team?
A: Yes, although I’m hesitant to share too many personal details about team members. We have core team members who have been working in different fields of IT security for several years.
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Q: Since #COLX is planning on having some sort of a marketplace where you can take advantage of computing resources and the blockchain as well, are there any plans on introducing smart contracts? Will it help the grid? Is there a place for it?
A: This has been mentioned a few times in the past so it’s something on our radar, it’s currently not in the development timeline as the Colossus Grid is a massive amount of work. There may be a place for it as the blockchain industry evolves, and I can certainly see some cases where a smart contract can add some value to the Colossus Grid.
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Important Information:
Website
Whitepaper
Roadmap
Business Plan
Wiki
Governance
Partners
GitHub
What is ColossusXT? (YouTube)
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Follow ColossusXT on:
Twitter
Facebook
Telegram
Discord
Forums
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AMA History:
2018 Q1 2018 Q2 2018 Q3 2018 Q4
2019 Q1 2019 Q2 2019 Q3 2019 Q4
2020 Q1

NYC Meetup - Full Summary!

Following up on my other post which shared only a few high level points I thought people would be interested in, here's a more in-depth summary of the meetup. THIS IS VERY LONG! I don't really have a TL;DR beyond my other short highlight thread, but I think there are some other high level summaries. This is for those who want a very thorough recap of what was discussed. I'm happy to update this with anything shared in the comments which I remember and think is additive to the summary, definitely didn't catch every single thing.
I'm leaving out a few talking points/questions that either 1) I didn't totally catch, 2) provided no incremental information or 3) were just bad questions (there were some).
Sunny's Speech
Sunny began with a history of blockchain, from the bitcoin whitepaper to the first few alt coins to the advent of Ethereum. He then went on to discuss the extent to which these various stages involved meaningful/useful innovation: original alt coins did not, ethereum of course did, but is heavily flawed for enterprise use. He then went on to discuss what those primary flaws are and how VeChain is trying to solve them (scalability, governance, cost, etc.) He noted that technology is not blockchain's biggest obstacle, it's adoption. He talked about how, although some people will tell him to "get lost or something" he doesn't really believe in full decentralization. I think his point was that although it's nice in theory, it just isn't really practical, and it's a bad approach in particular for trying to get this new blockchain technology adopted in the mainstream. This goes back to something he said in another interview at some point - you can't just come in with totally new, radical technology outside the existing framework and replace everything that exists from the outside. You have to start within the existing framework, show people what's possible, and then change the system from the inside out.
He went on to discuss what he sees as problems with some of the existing projects. Talked about how projects in the top 20 have ecosystems worth 2 billion dollars, hold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of their own tokens to be used for the project's development etc., but they don't have a CFO. He thinks that should concern people.
I don't remember exactly where it fit in the narrative, but he discussed valuation/speculation. He pointed out that they have a number of their university research partners trying to work out token valuation models. He made a general point that more utility should equal more value, the implication being VeChain will have more real utility (and should therefore have more value) than any other blockchain. They had a slide showing some calculations and pointed out that if you look at the known metrics, the dividends, etc., the price of Google's stock is 85.7% speculation. Only $161 of it's $1,128 value (at the time they ran these numbers) can be tied to the current value. For Tencent, it's 93.5% speculation. He jokingly pointed out that in crypto it's about 99.99%, but I think one of the unspoken points here is that it's silly to think that on mainnet launch speculation about the future value is going to go away and you'll just have token value based on current Thor production. That isn't how markets or valuation work.
He then basically mocked people complaining about the code not yet being open source, and there being no whitepaper - the people who think these are red flags and that the project might be a 'scam'. As if PwC and DNV GL didn't do extensive diligence.
On this point, I'll quote GarzyWarzy from another thread:
"Sunny mentioned that the crypto community as a whole doesn’t seem to appreciate the level of reputational risk that these multi billion dollar enterprise partners take by publicly backing a blockchain startup (“what do people think would happen if PwC backed us and we failed in 6 months?”). As an investment banker who deals extensively with corporate governance issues and every type of business risk imaginable, I will add my two cents that this risk is massive and that is it a clear sign of extensive diligence and extreme trust in the VeChain team to execute their business plan for developing their ecosystem. Always remember, “it takes many years to build a reputation, and seconds to ruin it”."
I'm a corporate lawyer and couldn't agree with this more. The people who think a whitepaper (which they likely wouldn't even understand) is more reassuring than the endorsement by DNV GL, PwC, Draper and Breyer (who would never, ever make such an investment without extensive due diligence) have no idea how things work in the corporate world. DNV GL and PwC are recommending VeChain to clients, and Draper and Breyer have made investments through their funds, where they have a fiduciary duty to the investors in those funds. The amount of diligence that occurs before taking those reputational and legal (negligence, breach of fiduciary duty, etc.) risks is truly exhaustive.
Back to adoption, Sunny went on to compare blockchain to TCP/IP, as he's done in the past. Most people use email every day, but do they care about TCP/IP? Of course not. Blockchain will be the protocol infrastructure for things people use every day, whether they know it or not.
At this point, continuing to talk about adoption and use cases, he mentioned that they signed a top 3 insurance company in China as a client, and he also mentioned a CRM use case that's in the works.
He said the whitepaper will be out in a few days, and will explain a lot of what they're doing/what they're trying to do, and what some of the use cases are. They are focused on developing as many practical use cases as possible - this is how you get adoption. Once the use cases are defined, you can start "developing killer dApps" in relation to them. I think this is, to some degree, a subtle shot at Ethereum - his point here being that developing lots of dApps on a platform doesn't really mean much unless those dApps actually relate to a practical, defined real world use cases which ensures they will be used and adopted.
The whitepaper took so long because, in Sunny's words, his "english sucks" and after he wrote it, his teams needed to double, triple, and quadruple review/edit/refine what he wrote so that it is in professional english.
Back to adoption, he stated there are around 13/14 crypto projects they are working with who intend to use VeChain (either porting over from Ethereum or launching an ICO on the platform. More on this in the Q&A section). One of them is a company that already generates $50 million/month in revenue and want to 'blockchain-ize' their business. He pointed out here this is a company that isn't just interested in padding their coffers - they have money, that isn't an issue. These are the types of projects they like to work with. They aren't interested in being a 'shitcoin generator' (this was said by Sunny in the Q&A and got a laugh and round of applause). Last point on this, he noted that BitOcean is taking so long because the "Japanese government are being assholes". That's a direct quote. Sunny is hilarious. I can't overstate how likable he is - he comes off as a down to earth, cool, funny and easy going guy.
Kevin's Speech
Next, Kevin spoke. This was a short update on authority nodes and the mainnet. He mentioned that most projects have masternodes as basically a marketing tool, they aren't that meaningful or necessary. VeChain's authority masternodes are essential to the ecosystem. You can not become an authority node if you can not meaningfully contribute to growing the ecosystem. There is no room for negotiation on this. They aren't interested in having random people running validating authority nodes for profit and nothing else. As far as the application process, they received over 100 applications and are expecting more (authority node application and monitoring process will be ongoing to make sure VeChain has the best authority nodes possible and that each node is continuing to fulfill all of its obligations). As far as the applicant pool, they were about 71% enterprise, 29% individual. About 52% China, 23% America, then a mix of HK, Singapore, Japan, and others.
He then addressed the mainnet. Internal testing is done, they are now moving on to the public alpha testing, which is by invite only and is not the open source phase. This phase starts today and includes a number of professional firms auditing the code: PwC's cybersecurity team, secureware.io, Slow Mist, and Hosho. They will also be putting a bug bounty on Hacken eventually, finding a critical vulnerability could get you up to 2000 VEN tokens. This private testing will go on for a few weeks, before the public testing begins in early June which involves the code becoming open source - as of now, they expect it to start in the first week or two of June.
Then, he announced the 1 VEN to 100 VET token split. The example he gave was talking to friends about buying Bitcoin - some responded "it's already $8000, I can't buy a bitcoin I can't afford it". Kevin would respond, well actually you can buy .001 bitcoin if you want... and then they'd lose interest. I think what he's getting at is they want to be prepared for years down the road when demand is enormous - they don't want people dealing in fractions. Yes, I'm also sure they are aware of the implications for this in terms of price and the attractiveness of a 5 cent token verses a 5 dollar token. I don't deny that. Look at fucking Tron.
The Q&A Session
Someone asked about how the authority nodes will be monitored. Kevin explained there will be a dedicated team for this. They are serious about having the highest quality authority nodes and holding them to the standards they expect. There will be a quarterly review process, and any issues will be brought to the Steering Committee, which may decide to remove/replace an authority nodeholder if they aren't contributing and fulfilling their obligations. He noted that the whitepaper will include a thorough section on their governance model.
Question about it being difficult, currently, for companies (especially in the west) to find out how to contact them and work with them. What are VeChain's plans in terms of a business development team, marketing, etc. Sunny explained that while obviously they'll have an internal BD team, and this is being built out, they also want to heavily leverage the resources of the community. In a way, the community will be a giant business development team, and they will create standard toolkits for the community to use to market/introduce VeChain to people in the first instance. The guy then asked what if I got you Pfizer - that's enormous, what's my incentive? Sunny responded there will be rewards in VET tokens for bringing them clients.
I don't remember what the exact question was, but it was noted at this point that although the private, consortium chain is an Ethereum fork, the mainnet was built from scratch and is not an Ethereum fork. They did intentionally use the Ethereum Virtual Machine, though, so that Ethereum dApps can be easily ported over to VeChain. It sounds like they expect this to happen quite a bit. They also talked about how they went through the web3 libraries and 80% will be able to work directly with VeChain. They want interoperability, compatibility, and ultimately, an easy transition for Ethereum developers and dApps.
Someone asked about them building out their own IoT business or letting others do the IoT work. Sunny talked about how he believes IoT is the way to connect blockchain to the physical world. There was a story not worth sharing about why they initially acquired an IoT team, but he gave this example: when Apple first released the app store and the ability to develop, nobody knew how or used it. So, Apple built the apps themselves and basically showed everybody what was possible and how to do it by example. So too will VeChain take this approach. They are partnering with IoT manufacturers and developing some of their own IoT solutions, and they'll continue to do this, but the point isn't to dominate IoT. They are showing the world by example what can be done in terms of IoT on the VeChain platform, and they ultimately want people/enterprises to be able to create their own value and their own IoT solutions on the VeChain blockchain. Anyone who wants to do so will be able to.
Question about enterprises buying once the enterprise pool runs out - what happens if enterprises aren't comfortable doing what all of us have done (wiring money to a fiat gateway exchange, buying bitcoin/ethereum, moving it to binance, buying in the market, transferring out of binance, etc.). Kevin isn't really worried about this. They are talking to exchanges and service providers about it, they're talking to Circle about fiat pairing, etc., but realistically Kevin can see that exchanges are becoming more advanced and that ultimately they will be institutionalized in a way that basically just mitigates this concern.
Question about storage of VET tokens after mainnet. There will be a mobile wallet launch at the exact same time. This mobile wallet will 1) facilitate the token swap from VEN to VET (most people will probably do this on exchanges, but eventually you'll be able to do it in the mobile wallet if you missed doing it on an exchange), 2) have a module that shows you what kind of node you are, 3) automatically receive your generated Thor, and 4) eventually allow you to hold other ERC-20 tokens. They also mentioned that although they're talking to ledger, etc. they are developing their own hardware wallet. Kevin explained this is essential for enterprises serving as authority nodes or holding large amounts of VET. They aren't going online and ordering a ledger and setting it up. VeChain needs to be able to provide this service and assurance for them, and they will. This is why these guys are lightyears ahead in terms of enterprise adoption. They've thought about these things.
Question about 'competitors' like Waltonchain. First, Sunny goes "who?" and Kevin goes "what's Waltonchain?" But then Sunny went on by saying the "right" thing - there are no competitors in such a fledgling industry. He would love to hold hands with the other blockchain projects trying to do good things, and walk into the future together. He thinks projects can learn from each other and help each other. They aren't trying to crush competitors or beat anyone or anything like that. However, Sunny also jokingly asked "Seriously, why do people think Waltonchain is our competitor? We are what, 15th biggest project, and they are...?" He also went on to say that he is judging some competition or tech demo later this month on the 26th-28th, and that Waltonchain is the demo product. He thinks this is sort of funny, but also said if their product is great and the demo is good, there is no reason he wouldn't support them, vote for them, etc.
Question about Breyer and Draper relationships. Draper is invested in many cryptocurrency projects and many companies, has tons of connections, and he gives VeChain a way of talking to all of those projects/companies. Breyer was the one who set them up with the research team at a Chinese university, he was the link to Circle to discuss fiat onramps, etc. The connections these guys bring are tremendous. I should note here that in a small group conversation with Kevin during the networking portion after the speeches, which was initiated by GarzyWarzy (perhaps he can elaborate further), he confirmed that Breyer and Draper are both meaningfully invested in tokens, not just equity of the technology portion of the company.
Some clown actually used up time to ask "is CCK here?" Sunny said someone asked him this at Harvard also, and he was absolutely adamant that he doesn't know who this person is or how they are getting the information they have. He did not comment on it beyond that. He clearly thought it was a dumb question and said seriously that once and for all, he really doesn't know who it is.
Question about how many projects will be running on the mainnet day 1. Sunny said it's hard to say for sure, but that there are currently between 20 and 25 use cases deployed on the consortium chain, all of which will be moved over in the first few months. He also mentioned the 15ish crypto projects that will be moving over to or launching on the platform, and the fact that their client pipeline is now over 250. He transitioned a bit from this point to discuss how they "don't want to be a shitcoin generator". If you come to them with a project that is just an ICO with a whitepaper and no product, no proof of concept, etc., they're not going to want you to launch that. They would rather invest in you if they think you're a good project, help you develop those things, prove out what you're trying to do, then help you launch a serious ICO or dApp with a real use case. Again, they are all about practical use cases, this is the path to adoption. That said, the project will be open source ("you guys asked for open source, so") there will be some shitcoins, it's unavoidable.
I think that covers most of what I remember. Hope you all enjoy!

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Buying Ether in Canada, my experience with different exchanges

Hello, I'm writing about my experiences buying ethereum in Canada, essentially converting CAD to ETH. The goal is to help beginners that are interested in getting started but don't know where to actually buy ether. There's a lot of info out there but most of it seems to be centered around USD, which doesn't always translate for CAD and our banking system. I'm by no means an expert but I figured someone might find this information helpful.
I've verified and used the following sites, so I'll be writing about them:

Coinbase
QuadrigaCX (referral) | non-referral
Kraken
Coinsquare (referral) | non-referral - just added

If you just want the gist of it, a super-quick summary of what I found:

Coinbase: great if you just want to try things out. Fast to get ether, fast to verify, high fees.
QuadrigaCX: great if you're looking to get more seriously into cryptocurrency. Most deposit options, lower fees.
Kraken: great if you have a ton of money you want to transfer into cryptocurrency or if you want to play around with trading. Low fees, slow CAD deposit because wire transfer.
Coinsquare: Fees aren't bad, low volume though.

With every one of these sites, there's usually some form of verification. This involves taking a picture of some piece of government ID (usually passport or drivers license), as well as some sort of proof of address such as a utlity bill. Some sites require you to take a selfie with some of that documentation or holding a handwritten sign. It seemed sketchy to me at first, but every place does it.
Coinbase
This was the first place I tried. Their only payment methods I could find are Visa and MasterCard, of which they charge a 3.75% convenience. With reward cards you might get 1%-2% back, but this is a fairly high fee. The bright side is it's just about instantaneous.
One thing I noticed is that their sell price is about ~$5 higher than a few exchanges. For example, as I write this, it's $119.23 on coinbase. On kraken it's 113.99 for a market order.
There is a weekly $200 limit on the amount to buy. A 30 day countdown started after I spent $500 to increase the limit. I can't find what the new limit amount will be once that countdown reaches 0 though.
So far, I've been with them for over a month and I've bought $600 worth of ether. The first time I bought it only took a minute to get sent to my private address. The second time it took ~40 minutes for it to actually get sent to my private ether address, but this was due to some issues they were having, probably just a fluke. I've bought two more times since then and both times it was instant.
To summarize
Pros:

Fast to verify, took a couple minutes, seemed to be completely automated
Almost instantly sent funds via Visa/Mastercard
Instantly got the ether I bought
Probably the easiest to use

Cons:

Generally $5 over Kraken prices
High fees at 3.75%. Might be able to brought lower with a good rewards card
Low $200 weekly limit

QuadrigaCX
Hoping to get lower fees, this was the second place I tried. They accept a lot more payments with a variety of fees, I'll list them out:

Funding Type	Daily Limits	Time Frame	Fee	Verification
Electronic Funds Transfer	Min $250, Max $10,000	5 Business Days	5%	required
Interac e-Transfer	Min $500, Max $5,000	Next Business Day	2% + $5	required
Interac Online	Min $50, Max $2,000	Instant (but may be held 24 hours by security)	1.5% (min. $5)	required
Bank Wire	Min $100,000, Max $500,000	2-4 Business Days	Free	required
Crypto Capital	Min $500, Max $500,000	24 hours	Free	required

Electronic Funds Transfer replaced their "direct bank transfer" option, and while I think it's great since I think every bank supports it, it unfortunately has a rather high fee at 5%. I don't really see why you would use this though, if you can use Interac Online, it's faster. If you need the higher daily limit, a bank wire would be cheaper too.
Interac e-Transfer I'd go with this if your bank doesn't support Interac Online and if you don't mind the 2% fee. If you're doing a large amount, the Bank Wire would be a better choice, depending on how much your bank charges you.
Interac Online seems like the best choice for less than $2000. Unfortunately even though my bank card says "Interac" on it, and the bank is listed as supported, I can't use it for Interac Online because the card is both a debit and visa card. I've read that RBC and BMO are the only banks that support this, so it may be worth signing up with them.
Bank Wire ended up being what I used (EDIT: back then the minimum for a wire transfer was $500). I wanted to deposit a larger sum, so just paying my bank for the cost of the transfer ended up being worthwhile (about 0.5% fee). The downside is I had to go in person to a branch to send a wire transfer and it's only really worthwhile for larger transfers.
Crypto Capital seems like a 3rd party that you can wire to and then transfer that to QuadrigaCX. I don't see the appeal in using this to fund an account since you can just wire to QuadrigaCX directly.
I sent the wire transfer a few days ago, and it seems like it will take 3-5 business days for it to complete. ~~I'll update this post if the money somehow just disappears.~~ Wire transfer came through today, no problems :)
Once you do get CAD on QuadrigaCX, the fees to buy Ether are 0.5%. Combined with my wire transfer cost, I expect to only have paid a total of 1% in fees.
To summarize
Pros:

Fast to verify, I was able to verify the same day I made my account
Lots of variety in funding choices
Lower fees compared to coinbase
High daily fund limits

Cons:

Not as many deposit options if they don't support your bank
0.5% per completed trade is a little high compared to other exchanges
Some transfer options have higher fees than coinbase for low amounts
Some transfer options can take up to 5 days

Kraken
The latest site I've tried, they have multiple tiers of verification. You can't deposit CAD until you reach tier 3 verification, which can take up to 48 hours.
Tier 1 and tier 2 were verified within the hour but tier 3 was still not verified 3 days later. When I submitted a support ticket, they were very quick to respond the next day and told me I needed to submit a Confirmation ID. Their site listed the Confirmation ID for a few countries and some criteria but it didn't seem like Canada applied to any of the criteria. Regardless, I submitted the Confirmation ID and was verified with tier 3 that same day.
The only way to deposit CAD with Kraken is through wire transfer and it seems like there's some unlisted fees based on what their banks charge them to receive a wire transfer (as well as any intermediary bank). I have not done this so I cannot tell what the costs would be.
Once you do have CAD on their exchange, their fees are better than QuadrigaCX with a MakeTaker rate at 0.16%/0.26%.
I have sent ether to Kraken just for playing around with trading and I've had no problems.
To summarize
Pros:

Low trading fees
Potentially lower CAD->ETH fee than QuadrigaCX, depending on if there are wire transfer hidden costs. Lower trading fee helps
High fund limits

Cons:

Only one way to deposit CAD and it's slow
Unclear what the wire transfer costs are
Little confusing verification process for tier3

Coinsquare
Verified today and decided to try the Interac e-transfer. This is when I encountered a problem (at least on firefox), for funding the account, they have a javascript button to dismiss an overlay before you can do the e-transfer. The html element for the button is an href and has a 'blank="target"' property on it. When I press this button, it opens a blank new tab, and nothing changes on the page. Running the javascript function manually causes the alert to be removed and it works as expected. This is a little insane that I had to have knowledge of html to get access to it. Their site has been improved a significant amount and I haven't ran into these kinds of problems since.
Anyway the e-transfer itself worked perfectly, it funded my account, and I think it's my favourite way to transfer CAD into exchanges so far. Only a 2.5% fee and only takes a few minutes to be in my account. They also have wire transfer, money order, and bank order, but I think other exchanges have a much better interface.
Buying Ethereum was a bit more confusing since (as far as I can tell) you can't trade CAD to ETH directly, you have to trade CAD for BTC first, and then trade that BTC for ETH.
The interface for placing an order was confusing to me compared to Kraken or QuadrigaCX, but I figured it out. Although I was interested in seeing how many orders there were and for how much, but I wasn't able to find that.
Buying BTC has a trade fee of 0.1%, and then trading for ETH has a trade fee of 0.2%. Overall total fees for e-transfer were ~1.3%~ 2.8% now, which is great considering what other fees are and how fast it is in comparison. If you can get past the interface, e-transfer is the way to go.

Funding Type	Daily Limits	Time Frame	Fee	Verification
Interac Online	Min $100, Max $2,000	Instant (withheld for 3 days)	2.5%	not required
Intac e-Transfer	Min $100, Max $3,000	1-3 days (withheld 0-7 days)	5%	required
Flexepin	Min $20, Max $500	instant	2.5%	required
Bank draft	Min $1000, Max $9,000	0-2 days (withheld 0-5 days)	0.25%	required
Money Order	Min $100, Max $1,000	0-2 days (withheld 0-5 days)	0.25%	required
Wire transfer	Min $10,000, Max $300,000	0-1 day (withheld 0-2 days)	0.5%	required

They have this concept of withholding funds, where you basically have to keep the money on the account. You can trade with it as much as you want, but you won't be able to withdraw until after the withholding time.
Pros:

Lowish trading fees
Some options are fast to fund
Reasonable fund limits

Cons:

The direct way to go from CAD->ETH has higher trading fees. Have to go CAD->BTC and then BTC->ETH.
~~Horrible interface. Until they fix their site, some stuff is broken (unless it works in other browsers?), or if you know how to edit html.~~ Wow! They really fixed their site and it looks great now! Only thing that bothers me is in the advanced section, it lists the CAD/BTC price in terms of bitcoin. So instead of saying $3400/bitcoin, it says 0.00029378BTC
Fairly high withdraw fees (unfortunately I can't find them listed on their site, and I can't find it listed anywhere, but some people have reported it being far too high)

Alternatives
There are of course other sites to get ether, and there's always the option of getting bitcoin and exchanging it through an exchange like Kraken or Poloniex for ether. There are bitcoin ATMs scattered around as well, but I can't comment on any fees involved or how close they match exchange prices.
Other sites I checked out:

Local Bitcoins - It looks like I'd have to find another user to trade with and prices seem far higher than the exchanges.
Poloniex - Doesn't look like you can deposit CAD.
Gemini - Don't see a way to deposit CAD. Also sent verification 2 days ago and have not been verified.
Bitfinex - Can't wire transfer USD out at this moment and I don't see a way to deposit CAD.
Coinswitch - Can't deposit CAD.
GDAX - Can't deposit CAD.
CEX.IO - Price quotes are signficantly higher than other exchanges, and it looks like it only does USD. Right now, their site says you can buy 1 ETH as $289.25 USD, compare that to GDAX which has them trading at $259.98 USD. You can sell on it too, but again, the price isn't favorable, sell on it for $250 USD vs selling on GDAX for $260 USD.
QuickBT - Only small amounts of ETH, and fees seem to range between 5-9% depending on how much you buy. Only supports interac online and flexepin.

Alt Coins
The main sites for getting CAD into the cryptocurrency space like QuadrigaCX, Coinbase, Kraken, and Coinsquare don't have a lot of altcoins. Fortunately once you have ether you can send it to another exchange and trade that for altcoins. These are my favourite ones:

Bittrex - You can't buy ETH with CAD directly, but it has a lot of other cryptocurrencies. I used this until Binance came out. They closed accounts for people unverified or from some countries, so I'd be wary about using it.
Binance - You also can't buy ETH with CAD directly on this one, but it's my favourite for getting into other cryptocurrency coins. Fees are also lower than bittrex if you hold their BNB coin and they add new coins much faster. Referral | Non-Referral
Kucoin - Registration on Binance/Bittrex has been up and down lately and I've had success using this exchange. They seem to add coins even faster than Binance, but the site is a little bit slower and less polished. Still functional and good to pickup a few alts that you can't get elsewhere. Referral | Non-referral

Funnily enough, this whole experience has made me appreciate the flexibility cryptocurrency like ether has and served as a reminder to how slow and cumbersome transactions become once the banking system is involved.
EDIT: received wire transfer through QuadrigaCX, made account with coinsquare.
EDIT2: added coinsquare section
EDIT3: updated QuadrigaCX and coinsquare section, updated alternatives list
EDIT4: Added e-transfer for QuadrigaCX!
EDIT5: Cleaned up alt coins section.

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